Downloading "foreign" apps

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May 23, 2016

I am from Australia and am going to be in Italy for a month. On arrival I bought a prepaid Vodafone SIM for my Nexus 6P.

Registration appeared to go OK and the welcome SMS told me to download the "My Vodafone Italia" app to check balance and recharge.

Unfortunately the Google Play Store thinks it is smarter than I am and will not show me the app when I search for it. I was able to find a link to it but the Play Store then tells me that the app is "not available in my area".

Is there any way to override this? I tried switching the phone language to Italian but that did not help.

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Sep 22, 2010

As I understand and what I've actually found in the past, Google Play Store basically has two ways of determining your location and the content it has, all depending on whether you've registered a credit card with it or not.

If you haven't registered a means of payment, then it apparently it goes on the IP address of the country you're in. We've had posts about that before, about being able to tie it down to the home country. Seem to remember someone from the UK was getting all Spanish content while he was in Spain.

If you have registered a credit card, then it goes on the country of the card issuer. And I've seen this myself, I registered a Hong Kong credit card, and I was still getting the Play Store content for Hong Kong, much of it in Chinese, while I was in the UK. So I assume you've registered an Australian credit card, and that's what it fixed it on. Bare in mind if you do manage to change your Play Store country to Italy, much of the content, things lik ebooks, movies, TV shows, etc, are very likely to all be in Italian. Which the person who got the Spanish Play Store wasn't happy about, it was all in Spanish of course.

Presumably Vodafone Italia only makes their app available via the Play Store, and not available for direct download and sideloading. Do you really need to install their app? Usually with pre-paid SIM packages, you can dial a number or send a code, which should have come with the SIM, and it will tell you how much credit or minutes you've got left. And can recharge it via their website, or any Vodafone store or even supermarkets, tobacconists and newsagents etc, with top-up vouchers.